- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

I love to go down to my local fish market early in the morning, and plan a whole meal around the catch of the day.

Mussel mariniere steamed in a white wine, fennel and garlic in a classic French bistro dish.

I'll show you how to make a whole lot of monkfish stuffed with bitter broccoli, and served in a tarragon and tomato sauce, with a simple dish of steamed cauliflower on the side.

Individual do-ahead cranberry souffle in a red wine sauce make a spectacular finale.

Join me as the bounty of the ocean meets the hearty flavor of the earth.

It's a feast from the sea, next on "Today's Gourmet."

(light music) (light music continues) Today, we're doing a feast from the sea.

Very distinctive taste.

The moule marinieres in French, mussel mariniere or mussel sailor-style.

A very simple, classic dish you have in bistro in France.

Those mussels are very clean, as you see.

I've washed them just recently, rubbed them one against the other, get any crustacean out.

And I have a bunch of mussels here, which as you see are open.

Are open mussels good or bad?

Not necessarily.

What you have to do to start is bang one again the other and see if they close.

If those obviously are not closing, you can also touch the little mussel inside.

If they don't touch, if they don't close, they are dead.

If they are still alive, they will close.

I don't seem to have one.

Oh, this one just closed.

So, this is very important because you can also rely, of course, on your nose and smell them.

You will have a very strong smell, and if there is bad smell just throw it out.

In any case, be sure to remove the beard, you know those long things that you have here, and rub them one against the other in a lot of water, and we put them directly in there with some white wine, the classic dish.

A dry, fruity white wine.

And with that we are going to put some garlic.

We have scallion, we have garlic, we have fennel, and we have onion.

So we'll start putting a bit of chopped onion.

Those are all very earthy type of thing.

We use also to put, again, we can put a little bit of olive oil in it, but it makes it richer.

You can leave it just straight, as I'm going to do here.

This give you a lot of green, all of that are from the onion family.

You put those right in there, right here, give you a lot of color.

And we add a little bit of fennel to this here.

The fennel bulb there, about that amount.

It give you that type of liquorice taste, which goes so well with product from the sea.

And it's not cooked very long, so it's still has a bit of crunchiness.

Watch out, sometime those fennel bulbs can be a bit tough, so test it first.

You can use the rest to make a salad.

A salad with it, it goes well.

Then, of course, garlic in it.

I can just crush garlic, and the crushed garlic, you can add it directly to your mussels.

As they cook, you want to toss them around with a towel like this to bring the open one on top.

You can even keep the lid like that, and use your thumb with the lid to toss them this way.

And, that's a good way of doing it.

About seven, eight minutes of cooking, and they're going to look just like those are, open, as you can see here.

And what we wanna do, the classic way, is to serve them.

You see they render a lot of liquid, and in family you may have the mussels just brought to the table in this way, which is perfectly fine.

If you wanna be a bit fancier, you open them.

Watch out, this is very hot.

And we can, for example, put them here if you have the half open mussels here that I have.

And you can open them this way, put the juice on top of it.

Ooh, those are hot.

Put the juice on top of it in a bigger plate than that, the juice, the onion, and serve them on the half shell, and that's very good too.

Another thing that you do, you do five or six open mussels per person with a little bit of butter, herbs, a bit of breadcrumb, put them under the broiler, it's like escargot type of thing.

On the first course it goes very well too.

But really the classic way is to serve them.

You serve them in bistro directly like that, a big bowl of it.

And although it's not common in France, it's more common like in Belgium.

In Belgium this is going to be served with french fry.

French fry and mussel, which goes so well together.

So this is the classic dish, and one way of eating it very often is to, with your finger like that sometime, and some of the time you take an empty shell like this as a pincher to go in the center of the other one and grab it this way to eat it instead of using it with a fork.

So the classic way that you will find in the real French bistro is going to be the moule mariniere there just like this.

And to continue our fish from the sea we're going to do a new fish now.

A very interesting fish, very ugly fish too that people use a lot now, the monkfish.

As you can see it that an enormous mouth, and a very small portion of the tail.

Just that small portion is edible.

This one, as you can see, I have the tail here, is from a larger fish.

Three quarter of the way is there.

Those are called monkfish or anglofish or frog fish, or a lotte, in France it's lotte.

I've already started taking that thick skin out of this, which you want to remove, and that skin is like leather.

And often in that form here, cut the tail here, we do a type of gigot in France, like a a leg of lamb.

We stud that with garlic, and you roast it in the oven.

There is another black type of skin on top, a bit tough.

You try to clean it up as much as you want.

And in the center of that you have that bone.

You see there is no bone in those two filet, so it's solid meat, very firm.

Some find it's akin to lobster, and some people have been known to use that instead of lobster.

I mean it doesn't really have the same taste, frankly, but it does.

It can withstand long cooking, as in a stew, it doesn't fall down, break apart like most fish do.

So you see I have the two filet here, and in the middle that very tough bone cartilage bone, that's it, there is no other little bone in between.

So it's an easy fish, very safe for children to have.

What we wanna do here is actually butterfly it, as I'm doing here because we wanna do a roulade, what we call a roulade.

That is a type of roll, stuff it inside.

So those filets are relatively a bit small, often I use bigger filler than that.

But, you see the inside is quite wide, that's what I want.

And, again, cut this one here.

Remember that you have to adjust according to your market.

If the filet is smaller, you do this.

If the filler is bigger, you only use one filet, and butterfly a large one.

To a certain extent what you want is a large square like that that you can eventually stuff, which is what I have here.

This is barely a pound, and I would like it to be slightly bigger than that, but I'm going to stuff it.

And first I wanted to tell you about that cauliflower, which, as you can see, is quite firm here.

We cut that cauliflower, and actually even that part can be used for soup, but otherwise we use the floret here.

See, what you want to look is something very firm, very tight like this.

We cut that in two.

See, and those florets, I put some of it there to steam, directly steaming them, and that's one of my favorite vegetables.

I think it's Mark Twain who said that cauliflower is a cabbage with an education, and it is something, I think it's a funny, but quite to the point.

In any case, here I'm going to put a little bit of olive oil in there, and start the stuffing for our fish.

And the stuffing is going to be done with garlic, which I have here, and diced mushroom.

So I put the garlic here saute it a little bit, the diced mushroom.

You can, of course, change your stuffing here.

What we're going to do is basically a vegetable stuffing.

And inside this, another type of cruciferous vegetable, again, part of the cabbage family, we call that broccoli di rabe.

It's bitter broccoli.

You can see the inside there is a little bit of a broccoli (indistinct).

We call it broccoli di rabe, or rabe, or rapini in Italian restaurant.

It's part, how I say, of the mustard and the cabbage family, and it's kind of bitter, and very (indistinct) and quite good.

As you see, the outside is kind of fibrous, and I'm pulling out those pieces which are a bit tough from the outside so that now the stem is standard.

Then you cut it into pieces.

We have it at home very often, it's classic to have that with sausage, hot sausage, and it's very good.

So this will be a different type of stuffing.

We add it to our mushroom now, it's seasoning nicely.

We'll have more than enough here.

A little bit of salt and pepper, and this now to to cook.

To cook for a little while.

Of course, I don't have time to let it cook and cool off, I have some which is cold here, and we're going to stuff our fish with it.

So what I want to do, the white part of the fish, which is inside the filet, I would rather have that on the outside.

So put the nice part on the outside, maybe the square part here this way, and we put our stuffing on top.

If it's a whole filet.

If the filet is whole, you may be able to roll it, but, for me, I have two pieces here, and I say because it's a bit smaller than usual.

So I have it this way, I'm going to put the other part on top here, trying to get it together as much as you can.

Let me see this one here.

That's it.

Gather it together this way, and we're going to tie it up like a roll.

Go there with the kitchen string again.

You wanna go around, roll it here, attach it, and do that little loop here that we call a half itch.

Again, a technique that we use for poultry, for other things.

Very good for your Christmas package.

Again, it's barely just a little loop that you slide underneath, and ease it into it.

Tighten it as many times as you want.

Then we cut it this way.

I have some extra ones that I can serve.

Gently roll it around, tighten it underneath, ore or less in the same way.

Roll it again so that you can be where we started here at both hands, attach it, and now you have your little roll.

So, this is ready to be sauteed.

Now we're gonna put a little bit of olive oil in that one here, and this, put a dash of salt on it.

What you want to do is to brown it on one side, a bit of salt, brown it on one side for a minute or two, and when is brown after you turn it on the other side, and let it cook covered for about 10 minutes, which is what I have here, as you can see.

So now I wanna remove this, it's cooked, to this, and we wanna create a sauce in the dripping of the pan here.

I'm deglazing that with a little bit of very dry white wine.

The very dry... Actually dry and fruity white wine.

This is a a dry (speaking in foreign language).

The (speaking in foreign language) tend to be sweet, but those are quite dry, so that will be good with it.

You bring that to a boil, boil it a minute or so.

Then we have fresh tomato in there.

And with the fresh tomato we're putting tarragon.

Again, the tarragon, the wine, the fish, the tomato will create a nice sauce.

And I can't even have a couple of leaves like this that I break on top.

Now, what I may want to do is to cut this now.

You want to do it like a roast.

You wanna cut the string, don't forget the string that we have here.

It's holding together pretty well now.

As you can see, the fish is going to firm up as it's cooked.

Here we are.

All we have to do is to slice it, and to serve it here.

Have a beautiful slice of the monkfish.

You can serve maybe a third piece.

Whoop.

Take a large knife for that.

The large knife will make it hold together better.

Extra piece here on the side.

A little piece for the cook.

And now you are ready to serve it with the red sauce that I have around, the red sauce and tarragon is going to go so well with it.

And with that I wanna serve the cauliflower that I have here, which has just been steaming, as you can see here, in that colander type of thing.

All you wanna do is to put it in there.

Now it's barely just a bit firm.

A little piece of butter will go in it, maybe a little dash of olive oil in there, salt, paper.

And we can put some chives.

One way of putting chive is also just cutting it into fairly coarse pieces like this.

You know a lot of chives, salt and pepper.

Then we wanna toss it together gently.

It's steaming.

It's just out of the steamer, for me it is the best, just like that put on the table.

I could eat a whole cauliflower by myself on this.

We're gonna put this in there, and serve the cauliflower with the monkfish here.

And don't forget the chive on top of it here as a delightful accompaniment.

(gentle music) We are finishing our menu with a cranberry souffle with a cranberry red wine sauce, a type of tart, sweet flavor.

It's a beautiful color.

Cranberries are very versatile, not only for sauces, as we do here we're going to do it for a dessert.

Of course, it's low fat, basically no cholesterol.

And in addition to that, you can freeze your souffle instead of putting it in the oven, or you can also refrigerate it.

Those package are available frozen or fresh basically year round, and you can use one or the other, it's perfectly fine.

But what we wanna do here is to do one of those 10 to 12 ounce packages here, and then we put a little bit of apricot jam in there this way, directly in this, a bit of sugar.

Remember this is very, very tart.

About a third of a cup of sugar.

And, a bit of water to go with it.

You wanna bring that to a boil, and cook it for about 20 minutes, let it cool off, which is what I have here.

So this is cold now.

What I want to do is to take about three quarter of a cup, I have about one and three quarter cup here, put it in there to do the sauce.

We are doing a red wine, a red wine and cranberry sauce.

And I'm using like a barbaresca there.

About half a cup of wine, a kind of pungent flavorful type of sauce.

Whoop.

(appliance whirring) And the sauce that I'm going to have here, I could strain it and I could use it unstrained.

I think that I am in a mood, in a country mood today, to do it just this way, unstrained, and it's perfectly fine this way.

That we're going to serve with our souffle later.

And what we have to do now with the rest of it, an egg white, we're going to beat some egg white.

I have half a cup of egg white here, which is not quite half a cup of egg white actually, slightly more than a third.

I have three egg whites here.

One cup of egg white is about 6-7 egg whites.

So, we'll start beating this.

You know, I use a copper whisk, a copper bowl there with a whisk, but I mean an electric mixer would be perfectly fine.

You want to lift it up, lift up your white, whole point detail.

And with a whisk like this for me, especially a large whisk which pick up the whole mixture in one stroke, I can beat egg white in about a minute.

Our egg whites are almost ready now.

If you get tired with one hand, change hand.

And basically three egg whites should give you approximately a good three cups of egg whites, one cup per egg white.

And this is what I have now.

Those hold a nice peak.

As you can see, fairly elastic and nice, which is what I want here.

Now, I'm going to put the rest of my berry in there.

I could fold it gently, or lightly mix it with the whisk.

And, now, I'm ready to mold my souffle.

I have four souffles here, and they are approximately, those are like three quarter of a cup molds.

It's going to be more than enough for fill up the mold, if I don't put too much on the tray on the outside.

Here we are.

See the berry, because they are cooked and fairly high in sugar, and now after they have cooked can kind of stay in suspension in the center.

And I have, you see, plenty to fill up that mold here.

I can even use a little bit of the extra one to put on top if I need to.

What you can do is, to make it smooth like that with a spatula.

The same thing with the other one.

I have some extra one here, the four of them.

You can leave them rough also.

You want with your thumb to clean up a bit of the edge so they start straight in the oven.

Same thing here.

And you can, if you want also, I have a little bit extra, do a little dome on top like this.

Give them a bit of a decoration when you cook them.

And, at that point, the important part of that, you can take the souffle and put them in the oven, or you can take them, put them in the freezer.

In the oven, about 12-14 minutes at the most, 375 degree, fresh.

Frozen, about 18 minute directly from the freezer into the oven.

And now it's time to cook our souffle.

Remember you can put them in the oven, you can also put them in the freezer, or the refrigerator, that type of souffle.

For there about 375 degree, 10-12 minutes.

I have some here which came directly from the refrigerator that we put, and they are just about right.

Those are about 15 minute.

For the conventional way of serving a souffle, I could serve it, watch out it very hot, directly on the little tray like this with a bit of powder sugar on top.

Remember that we have a nice sauce to go with it.

You know, you could even take a piece of the souffle, it's done like that.

Usually the maitre d does that in the dining room, taking the cap off the souffle, and putting some of the sauce inside, and putting the cap back on top of it.

But, we have another way of serving it here.

We're going to put the sauce directly on the plate, spread it out a little bit, then we powder one of the souffles.

This one looks good, I'm gonna powder this one.

And trying to get it directly out, lift it up from the thing, and put it directly on the sauce to serve it like that.

It's easier for your guests to serve it this way.

And, remember, that here the souffle, you wait for the souffle, the souffle doesn't wait for you.

So we start with our mussel mariniere, real bistro type of food.

Then we have that rollout of monkfish stuffed with that bitter broccoli.

It's going to go very well with the cauliflower with chive that we have after, a nice salad, and, of course, your souffle of cranberry, which would be terrific for Thanksgiving, with the red wine sauce.

It's great.

And for that we have a special wine today, we have a (indistinct), it's 100% Chardonnay.

Those wine are from South Africa, new coming on the market here, kind of fruity, delicious, quite inexpensive.

A perfect accompaniment for our meal today.

I wanna thank you for watching "Today's Gourmet."

Until next time, happy cooking.